ad infinitum
by nicnac918
Summary: You go on. And on. (and on and on and on). First in ergo sum series


When you die your body flickers out in blue flames, but it doesn't feel like you're burning. It feels like agony all through you, like you're being torn apart at the seams, ripping and pulling and tugging until something in you snaps. Just for a moment, you can see Axolotl towering above you, cradling you in his right hand and, just for a moment, you feel terrified. He smiles down at you and says, "Don't worry; I'm sending you back home."

You open your eyes, and you have no idea who you are.

That's not surprising, since you'd just been hit with a memory gun on full erase only a few minutes ago. It doesn't take you long to start to get your memories back and your life to form around you again, just an hour or two. You think you feel a bit smaller than you used to be, but that seems like a reasonable side-effect of total memory loss, and it doesn't last too long. Besides you feel bigger than you used to be before too, with your family all together and happy for the first time since you were a kid. Now you have your hopefully still rather long twilight years stretched out before you to live out your childhood dreams, sailing on the Stan o' War (II) with Ford, making frequent stops in Gravity Falls as well as in Piedmont to visit your two favorite kids, though Dipper and Mabel have to fight to keep that title once Soos and Melody start popping out little ones.

You stop ageing. No one notices at first; you've reached an age where old is just old and no one expects you to look that much different because another year has passed. Even when you do start to notice, you write it off. You got old at a relatively young age, so you think your body has probably decided to plateau until your physical age matches what's on your forged but still mostly accurate driver's license. But at a certain point, when Ford's aches and pains start getting to be too much for him and he's talking about retiring, when Dipper and Mabel are all grown up and having little gremlins of their own, when Fiddleford quietly passes away in his sleep one night, and you still look the same as you did on that long ago summer, if not better, you have to admit something's up.

There's a panic, which you find pointless. If Bill was really still around in your head somewhere and going to pull anything, why wouldn't he have done it yet? You can't stand to see your brother looking so worried, though, so you let him run all the tests he wants to make everyone feel better. In the end he confirms what you knew all along: there's no one in your head but you. Ford does manage to find a little piece left behind, a bit of power that lets you pull off some petty parlor tricks, most of them less impressive than the street magic you learned in your ten years on the road. The little ones think the hand on fire thing is pretty cool, but you're careful not to do it in front of Ford or Dipper.

Sixer keeps getting older, even when you don't. People stop assuming that the two of you are twins, then stop believing it even when you tell them flat out. It hurts more than it should. Then when Ford is ninety-two years old, he has a heart-attack. He dies.

You go on, though you're not sure how. Dipper and Mabel play a big part in that, and Soos and Melody and Wendy and all the little kids that come with them. The rest of the town helps too, and so do all the Zodiac members that have scattered far and wide since that summer. You get a sympathy card from Gideon Gleeful of all people, and you pretend like it doesn't make you cry.

You feel like you're only just getting over that, like you've only just blinked your eyes since laying Ford to rest, when everyone else starts to go. You don't care that they've all lived long full lives and it's their time; you don't want them to go and leave you behind. When the last person to live through Weirdmageddon with you kicks the bucket, you try to off yourself too. It doesn't take, and you don't try again. You go on.

People live and die, nations come and go, mountains rise and fall. Whole new planets are discovered, colonialized, built up into pinnacles of civilization, abandoned, and fall to ruin.

And you? You go on.

You stop caring about any individual person, then people in general, then you forget that you ever had in the first place. It's not callousness; it's self-defense. You can't take caring about people that come and go like mayflies and you can't miss what you don't remember. Or so you tell yourself.

Your powers grow stronger every decade, then every year, then every day. You keep pushing yourself, seeing what more you can do. It's the only thing that interests you anymore. Eventually you come to the conclusion that the only things you can't do are the ones you haven't figured out you can yet.

Case in point, after a couple of eons, you head to the edge of your universe to where the ends start to unravel. You think you knew once that there were other dimensions out there, but nothing ever came of it; you don't remember why. But now you know again and now you can see the way the edges of your dimension curl and fray, and from there it's very easy to take a step and go right beyond the walls of your home universe to the space between dimensions. From there another step takes you into a whole new dimension that you've never seen before. Two more steps takes you right back. You practice some more until you don't need to take the in-between step anymore. Then you turn and take a walk through time – time is just another dimension, after all, or if it wasn't before it is now – right to the end of your own universe, just to see what's there. You find an explosion and a five-star restaurant. You enjoy a meal at the latter while disinterestedly watching the former before dining-and-dashing to the beginning of the whole thing.

You aren't watching the beginning of your universe for very long, maybe a decade or two at the most, before some giant baby shows up to lecture you about the sanctity of the timeline or some junk. You can tell by looking he's nothing like on your level, but he's also got a stranglehold on time that you can't possibly match yet, so if you did try to take him out he'd probably jump somewhen else before you could finish. He's too boring to be worth the effort anyway. This whole dimension is too boring to be worth the effort. You've seen it from start to finish and there's nothing here you haven't seen before so many times that you're tired to death of it. So you give your home dimension a tip of the cap and a flip of the finger and go off exploring. This dimension will be here when you come back, if you come back. Or maybe not. Either way, you go on.

Dimensional travelers aren't common, but they aren't rare either, and it seems like they all have the same story: they got bored with where they were from and decided to see what else was out there. You don't like being the same as everyone else because you aren't like everyone else, so when the next travelers asks after your story you tell him, "The dimension I came from was boring. So I threw a show-stopping party and when that was done, I literally stopped the show. Permanently."

The guy nods. "Scorched Earth policy; I like it." You stick to that story after that. If you tell it enough times, you'll forget it's not what actually happened. Truth is relative, anyway.

When you live for long enough, you start to think you've seen everything, so when something finally does take you by surprise, it, well, takes you by surprise. She's someone like you, the first one you've ever met. "Touched by Axolotl," she calls it. You don't remember how you came to be the way you are, only that you weren't this way when you started. But she's a lot younger than you are; it makes sense that she might remember. Besides, it's as good an explanation as any.

Even though she's like you, she isn't really very much like you. You're impulsive and self-centered, and she's thoughtful, serious, and intelligent – no matter how much you know, you've never felt intelligent. Jheselbraum is… unswerving. She actually reminds you of someone, though you don't remember who. But everyone reminds you of someone else sooner or later, it shouldn't really mean anything.

She asks what your name is and you shrug. You've changed names hundreds, thousands, millions? millions of times, and you're bored of your latest one by now. She considers you thoughtfully and suggests, of all things, Bill.

Your lips curl up. There's something about that name. It's completely innocuous, but at the same time there's a feeling to the edge of it, like hair standing on end or scales being brushed in the wrong direction. "I don't think I've ever been Bill before. I like it." Somewhere along the line you pick up the name Cipher to go with the name Bill. You don't think it came from Jheselbraum, but maybe it did. It doesn't really matter either way.

You stay with Jheselbraum for maybe a millennium. The two of you probably fight as much as you get along, but it's different to have someone who actually can stick around. It's kind of nice, almost like having a family. But Jheselbraum loves her pristine mountain top too much, and you don't have it in you to stay still like that forever. So eventually it's goodbye for now, and you go on.

Dimensions don't have next doors, but if they did, the dimension next door to Jheselbraum's is a two-dimensional one. It's been ages since you've lived in less than at least five dimensions at once, so you get a kick out of playing around in two for a while. You play by their rules for as long as it's interesting, then bring the whole system crashing down from the inside. Before you can get to the grand finale, Jheselbraum interrupts, looking amused and exasperated, and asks you to tone it down; she can hear your antics all the way over in Dimension 52. You give her a salute that's only half sarcastic, then flit off to find a two dimensional world on the other side of the multiverse to start your game over again.

You get all the way through to the dimension's utter destruction this time and consider going for a hat trick, but you decide that game bores you now. You keep the triangle shape you assumed though. You're constantly changing your form when a different one suits your purposes better, and the triangle seems like a simpler default to come back to than the one you'd been using before. Besides, you've had that body since… Well, the fact that you can't remember when you first picked it up is proof that you've been using it too long. So triangle it is, but you do add a top hat and bow tie to the ensemble. It's important you keep things classy.

The problem with having met Jheselbraum is that you now remember what it feels like to be lonely; it feels like how you feel all the time. But J refuses to leave that mountaintop of hers for more than a decade and you refuse to go back to sitting around doing nothing again so soon. You have an idea that if there are two of you, then why not three or four or five, but trying to hunt down one other person in the entire multiverse that might not even exist sounds like a lot of work. Then you have another idea. If this Axolotl guy made you like you, then why can't you make someone like you?

Your efforts are partially successful. The people you change could never hope to be a match for you or Jheselbraum, but they can keep up, more or less. They're a little more fragile than you would like too, and you end up having to replace them periodically, but you decide they're good enough. Most importantly, this is a crew that knows how to party. And for untold eons, that's exactly what you do.

You all pick a dimension at random and then remake it in your own image; you become gods. Cruel gods, more than one set of natives is known to say, but that's not true. Cruelty implies a malicious foresight, but foresight is more J's area, and none of the rest of you are intentionally malicious. You're just children with an anthill and a magnifying glass, not that it would ever occur to you to make that comparison. Then when you've done all you can do, you move on to the next dimension and try something different. Lottocron Nine remains your most accessible work, the Do-Over Dimension your finest, but you're especially fond of the ones that partied so hard there's nothing left but dry wind and ash. They go out in style and, meanwhile, you go on.

Eventually you start wanting a home base, a place where you can hang out for a bit while you're in-between dimensions. So of course the place you choose is the one that exists in-between dimensions. It's dangerously unstable, and you lose more than one minion when the part they're in abruptly crumbles away to nothing or gets folded into the creation of a new dimension, but you like it anyway. It's got style. You collect all these scraps and pieces that no one wanted and you put them together until you've built something beautiful.

Jheselbraum shows up and you're ecstatic, even if she is standing there with forebodingly crossed arms and a scorching glare; you haven't seen her in ages. "Hey J, long time no see! Have you come to join the party, or to ask us to quiet things down a bit?" Your gang laughs, likely thinking the notion of someone making you tone it down is ridiculous. You think you probably would though, if Jheselbraum asked you to. You think you definitely would go back with her to her peaceful mountaintop for another few centuries, if she asked you to. But she doesn't.

Jheselbraum keeps her left arm crossed in front of her, but rotates the right one so that her hand is in the air. She snaps her fingers and in one terrifying moment you realize something you hadn't noticed before: this time Jheselbraum is much older than you are.

You can feel her power settle down on you like a heavy weight, choking the life out of you. "What did you do?" you demand.

"You're getting out of hand, so I'm putting you on time out. You won't be leaving this place for a very long time."

"Are you crazy? I'll die here!" You don't know if you'd live through the dimension crashing down around you or not, and that's not what you mean anyway. Your Nightmare Realm is beautiful, but it's not enough for you by itself, it's not a home. Being trapped here with no way out, the walls pressing in closer and closer until you can't breathe is going to kill you. You don't do well in prison.

"You won't die here," Jheselbraum says, and her voice is strong, resolute, unswerving. "One day Bill, you're going to burn." She leaves.

Her words are a cold comfort, but cold comfort is still comfort. It's enough to give you space to think. Once you start thinking, it doesn't take you long to figure out a way out of here, maybe a year or two. J's power has hemmed you in too tight to punch through the walls of this dimension, but there's nothing in it to stop you from heading through an already open door.

That might be a problem, because the Nightmare Realm is huge and there aren't that many travelers that come here on purpose, especially since you and the Henchmaniacs staked your claim, so the odds of just happening across an open portal are extremely small. It'll happen eventually, everything happens eventually, but you can't wait that long. Rather, you don't want to wait that long, but that's the same thing really. So that might be a problem, except for one glaring oversight J made when she limited your powers: your body can't leave the Nightmare Realm, but your mind is still free to go wherever you will. You don't need to wait around for a door to open; you can just trick someone into opening the door for you. There's a sucker born every minute. This shouldn't be too hard.

But it is hard, or at least harder than you were expecting. Your mind might be able to jump around in the mindscape, but apparently when Jheselbraum locked you into this dimension, she must have time-locked you too, and none of the dimensional travelers in this time have any interest in opening a portal for you. Really, between that and Jheselbraum's little tantrum, it's almost like people think you're the bad guy. With people who already have dimensional travel out of the mix, you're left to try to teach someone how to make a portal and then have them open it for you. The only problem is the people smart enough to learn from you tend to be too cautious to let you out, and the people reckless enough to fall in line without asking too many questions are too stupid to make a gateway. You're not sure what you're going to do to the next idiot who tries to make a trans-universal poly-dimensional meta-vortex with sticks, rocks, and leaves, but it's not going to be pretty.

One day you feel the tug of dozens, hundreds, thousands? thousands of summons across the multiverse, all originating from various versions of the same person. As soon as you see Stanford Filbrick Pines you know, deep down to the core of you, that this is your guy. Fordsy is going to be the one to set you free.

Ford is just so earnest, so naïve and full of wonder and eager to prove himself, not to mention pleased and awed and humbled by your presence; you really can't help but like him. Sure, you like him in the same way Ford might take a liking to a particular dust mote dancing in a sunbeam, but it's still more than you can say for most meat-sacks.

You try not to lie to him. You don't tell him all the truth, obviously, but you try to stick to telling him only truths, albeit ones that form shapes that he finds pleasing. You don't always succeed, because lying is so much easier than the truth, but you do try. Ford is worth the effort.

The nickname Sixer comes out one day without a conscious thought, but once it's out there you find you like the way the sound waves form in the air – or what passes for sound waves and air in the mindscape. It feels right. Ford looks uncomfortable for a moment, and you peer in his memories to see a highlight reel of his brother calling him by the same nickname. It makes a brief unpleasant feeling coil in your gut, but you brush it off. The nickname belongs to you now; Ford belongs to you now.

You really weren't expecting it to all blow up in your face the way it does. You were against Ford inviting Fiddleford out to help, but Ford insisted. Most of the Fords did, anyway, and the ones that bowed to your reservations never really got all that far in constructing the portal, so you suppose Ford had actually made the right call. But the more people involved, the more likely someone is going to pick some ridiculous moral grounds on which to object to you and your future presence in their dimension, and the whole thing is just so tiresome. You'd like to torment Fiddleford over the whole fiasco that resulted in Ford not trusting you anymore, but that seems a little too dangerous with the way he's constantly shooting himself with that memory gun, so you torment Fordsy instead. Really, you have to torment someone, but you don't mean to actually hurt Ford, not really. Or maybe you do, it's hard to tell. Either way the situation still might have been salvageable, if not for Stanley.

You hate Stanley Pines. Words are inadequate to describe how deeply you loathe him. It's not just because of the stunt he pulled pushing Sixer into the portal and ruining everything you worked for, or the way he categorically refuses to make a deal with you or even just let you help him speed along fixing the portal. No, you hate Stan because you look at him and see all the worst parts of yourself. All the sentimentality and desperation and willingness to do whatever Ford said just to get a scrap of approval. You take one look at Stan and you know that deep down he's got a voice telling him he's not good enough, he'll never be good enough, and you hate him for it.

You start off with thousands of different Fords all working toward creating a portal to free you, but one by one, ten by ten, hundred by hundred they drop off. Some never even finish the portal, stymied either by their own limitations or a crisis of their faith in your better nature. Some finish the portal but still make their dimension inaccessible to you, either by reworking the machinery to block you or by dismantling the portal altogether. The rest tumble through the portal themselves, breaking the thing in the process.

One of the Fords tumbles through his portal fairly close to where you happen to be at the time. Not close enough to jump through the gateway before it closes, but close enough to grab a hold of Stanford as he comes through, before he can scramble away and hide in the fog of the Nightmare Realm. It's lucky that you do, because your minions fail to capture even one other Ford, meaning you only have this one to try and convince to help you escape. It shouldn't be hard, most meat-sacks hate the Nightmare Realm and Ford has got to want to get back to his lame dimension, but he is as intractable as ever. You try more forceful methods to convince him, but you forget how delicate humans are, and Ford hasn't exactly been taking good care of himself lately. It doesn't end well, but you just shrug light-heartedly and say, "Whoops." The Henchmaniacs all laugh, like they're supposed to. For a brief moment you seriously consider slaughtering them all.

Instead you dive into the mindscape, using it to follow the Fords as they journey across the multiverse, just waiting for another opportunity. A handful of them find a dimension they like and settle down permanently, which is so unspeakably boring you stop following any Ford who does it. A lot of them die, which is disappointing, but not surprising. Then there are the ones that just disappear. It's not death because you can still get into their dreams. But their minds, which should be open to you until the end of time, are just gone. A Ford will just suddenly pass out one day, and then you get thrown from his mindscape, which shortly after ceases to exist as far as you can tell. It's baffling. And infuriating.

Finally, the thirteenth time it happens, you get your answer. This Ford manages to stay conscious just long enough for you to piece together that what's been knocking them unconscious is being yanked unceremoniously across dimensions. Right before he passes out, he gets a glimpse of the person who grabbed him, the one that's closing of their minds to you. Jheselbraum.

Immediately after that, you go find yourself a quiet corner of the Nightmare Realm, to recoup from the total disaster this whole thing has turned into. You consider destroying Pyronica when she accuses you of sulking, even if she's not exactly wrong. It only gets worse as more and more Fords disappear, until you decided to shut them out entirely.

You don't let yourself wallow for too long though, not more than a decade, maybe two. Yes, it's disappointing to have a plan fall through, and you had been so sure about Ford being the one to get you out of here and you hate being wrong, but you're Bill Cipher. You're bigger than this, bigger than this whole multiverse and everyone in it, including Jheselbraum and especially Stanford Pines. You are ready to move on to your next plan, whatever that ends up being.

So of course that's when you get summoned by 56 different versions of some twerp of a kid that tells you that Stanford apparently got back home to his own dimension sometime while you were busy not sulking. Hell, that's probably where Jheselbraum put them after sticking a metal plate in their head to keep you out. Screw the new plan, the old plan is back on. You'll just hop into Stanford's dream and tell him about the open-ended deal this idiot Gideon made with you. If Sixer is willing to open the portal for you, you'll go easy on the kid; maybe you'll only ask for one limb. If Ford refuses, then you'll help Gideon steal Ford's house, and then force him to open the portal for you instead. Win-win, and there's no way this could possibly go wrong.

Unless, of course, it turns out that Stanford isn't actually Stanford after all, but Stanley masquerading as his brother, something you discover when you slide right past the dreamscape into the mindscape, which you know for a fact has been blocked off to you for Stanfords of at least 17 of the 56 dimensions you're in. You hate Stanley Pines. You're sorely tempted to tear his mind to shreds, but you hold yourself back. There's a back-up plan to follow and a code to find.

A trio of kids show up trying to foil your attempts to steal the secrets of Stan's mind. As if they could stop you. It's actually a bit adorable in a hilariously pathetic way, and honestly nothing has really made you want to laugh in long enough that you go easy on these new little dust motes. Besides, they might make good pawns for later. Or hostages, you'll see how things go.

Not well. 42 of the Gideons decide to call off the deal in favor of blowing up the safe, and the remainder that do follow through don't get to the safe until after the code has been changed. Which doesn't mean you haven't held up your end of the deal, but if the kid doesn't have access to the portal, he's not much good to you, not to mention Stan has got the thing up and running on his own now anyway. You'll hold Gideons' IOUs for now until you can figure out something to do with them.

You surprise yourself by actually having fun messing around in Gravity Falls, even while limited to just the dreamscape. The place has always had a sort of charming weirdness, but you don't remember liking it nearly this much any of the last times. You're so busy enjoying yourself messing with the Pines family that you almost miss the latest visitor to the Nightmare Realm. Almost.

You had started off with thousands of different Fords all working toward creating a portal to free you, but one by one, ten by ten, hundred by hundred they dropped off. And then there was one. All the Fords are the same, or rather they're all different in the exact same ways, but the Ford from Dimension 46'\ has always been your favorite. There's just something about the guy that calls to you. So you're pleased that he's the one who eventually returns to the Nightmare Realm carting a death ray, of all things – that nerd has always had a tragic addiction to sci-fi. You play a bit of cat and mouse with him, and Ford actually thinks that he's the cat in this scenario, which is just precious. You're about to bring things to a close when, in a show of flawless timing, the portal back to 46'\ opens, and you can't help but shake with laughter at the ridiculousness of it. You really hate Stanley Pines.

Ford escapes, but before the gateway closes you manage to throw a bit of power in it, enough to hold it open just a sliver. A sliver that'll grow into a crack, then a tear, then a great rift that you can come pouring through. Ford manages to contain the rip in the fabric of his universe temporarily, but a few quick deals on your part and it is finally, _finally_ party time.

You offer to let Sixer join you and your gang. You mean it, even if it sounds like you're mocking him. That's just the only way you know how to be sincere. He refuses, which isn't that surprising, but you'll give him a chance to change his mind later. For now he'll make a good backscratcher, one from solid gold – only the best for Fordsy.

Later comes sooner than you expect, when you find out you're trapped inside Gravity Falls. If you still had your full powers you could probably just bust right out, but J really did a number on you. You're going to have to get her back for that later. Since brute force isn't an option, Ford's probably the only one who might know enough to let you out.

" _We'll meet again/ Don't know where, don't know when/ Oh, I know we'll meet again some sunny day."_ You aren't sure what makes you want to sing that song, but as soon as you do, you get a feeling that makes you wonder if you hadn't been hit with a bit of that gift of prophecy that Jheselbraum was always going on about.

Things get really annoying for a while after that, and you have to actually regrow your eye thanks to these stupid meat-sacks, but eventually you manage to make Fordsy see reason and he lets you inside his mind. As soon as you're in, your mental avatar goes looking for the equation Ford's hidden in here somewhere, while the rest of you puts down roots in the mindscape. You feel your subconscious take hold much deeper than you meant to, and possibly deeper than you ought to, but you don't care about that. What you care about is Ford is yours, and now nothing and nobody can keep you out of his mind ever again.

Unless, of course, it turns out that Stanford isn't actually Stanford after all, but Stanley masquerading as his brother. You don't have time to even get properly angry before the mindscape catches on fire. _One day Bill, you're going to burn._

When you die your body flickers out in blue flames, but it doesn't feel like you're burning. It feels like agony all through you, like you're being torn apart at the seams, ripping and pulling and tugging until something in you snaps. Just for a moment, you can see Axolotl towering above you, cradling you in his left hand, and, just for a moment, you feel terrified. He smiles down at you and says, "Don't worry; I'm sending you home."

You open your eyes, and you have no idea who you are.

That's not surprising, since you've just been born. There are a lot of other people in the room, but only two of them are important. The first one holds you in her arms, and she is much bigger than you are and smells like milk and sounds like what you can remember from before. The second is nestled in the first one's other arm, and he's the same size as you are, and you remember him from before too. The first one tilts her arms so the light streaming in from the sunny day outside hits both of you and coos at you. You don't understand any of it, but it sounds like _warmsafehappylove_.

Eventually you learn that the first one is called Ma and there's another big one called Pa and another one who's bigger than you but much smaller than Ma and Pa called Shermie. They are all your family. The second one is called Stanford and he's your family too, but even better than family, he's your twin, which means he's just like you.

Even though he's like you, he isn't really very much like you. You're impulsive and self-centered, and he's thoughtful, serious, and intelligent. Ford is… a nerd.

You like that he's a nerd. Ford is your best friend; you know deep down to the core of you that Ford is your guy, so you wouldn't want him any other way than exactly as he is. Plus the two of you make a better team this way, him for the brains and you for the punching. The two of you do everything together, shouting for all the world to hear that you're the kings of New Jersey, and in your hearts you believe it's true. (You'll never know it, because you'll never have the chance to sit back and consider the whole thing, but these are the best days of your life.)

The nickname Sixer comes out one day without a conscious thought, but once it's out there you find you like the way your lips form the words. It feels right. Ford looks uncomfortable for a moment, but you brush it off. Ford gets so upset about his hands sometimes, but you think that's stupid. You like Ford the way he is and you'd never want to change him. Besides, what's so great about five fingers? You've got five fingers, but everyone still likes Ford better than you anyway. Not that you mind, because Ford likes you the best the way you are, and that's more important.

For your seventh birthday, Pa lets Ford have this heavy antique magnifying glass that's been sitting around in the pawn shop forever. The two of you go exploring with it and stumble across an anthill. You show Ford a trick you've learned, twisting magnifying glass to focus the sunlight on one of the ants and it burns.

"Pretty cool, huh? We're like ant gods." you say. Ford laughs and tries it himself before going off about all the other things you could try this out on. You agree to run his experiments, but only after you mess around being gods to the ants some more. Cruel gods, the ants might say, but that's not true. Cruelty implies a malicious foresight, but foresight is more Ford's area than yours, and neither of you are intentionally malicious. You're just children with an anthill and a magnifying glass.

For your tenth birthday, your dad signs you and Ford up for boxing lessons. Ford hates them, but you're not sure if he hates them because he's bad at it, or if he's bad at it because he hates them. You're kind of bad too at first, but you push yourself to keep working until you get good at it. Brains and punching.

For your twelfth birthday you get the best gift ever, even though technically no one gave it to you, and your actual birthday was weeks ago. You think of it as a gift from the universe anyway because it's too awesome not to be a birthday gift. It's a sailboat, which you and Ford dub the Stan o' War because the coolest boat ever deserves the coolest name ever. It's dangerously unstable, and you're pretty sure if you tried to take it out into the ocean right now, you'd both drown, but you like it anyway. It's got style. You collect all these scraps and pieces that no one wanted and you put them together until you've built something beautiful.

For your seventeenth birthday you and Ford try taking the Stan o' War out for a test run. It goes pretty horribly, but no one drowns, not even a little bit, so you figure it could have gone a lot worse. The two of you are bound to have her all fixed up by this time next year, and then it'll be just you, Ford, and treasure hunting. And maybe some babes.

You make a mistake. It isn't smashing your fist on the table, because there was no way you could have known that Ford's machine was so delicate that something like that would mess it up. It isn't not telling Ford about what you'd done either, because you were sure you'd fixed it, so why get Ford all worked up over nothing? It isn't even trying to get Ford to look on the bright side of his nerd school not letting him in, because that's just your job; whenever something goes wrong Ford freaks out and overreacts, and you're always the one to convince him that the world isn't literally going to come to an end just because he missed one question on the English final. No, your mistake is the same exact mistake you always make, the one that's gotten you into more trouble than anything else you've ever gotten up to. Your mistake is forgetting to say, "I'm sorry."

So now you have no home, no family, no brother, and nothing to your name but a used car, a duffel bag that you hadn't even packed for yourself, the dollar you had in your pocket, and the thirteen cents in change you found in the backseat. Well screw them anyway; you'll show them. You're going to take your $1.13 and turn it into a million dollars. Once you have your million dollars, you're going to go back home, rub it in Pa's face, then turn around and leave and not look back.

You're going to take that million dollars and you're going to do three things with it. First, you're going to buy everything you need to get the Stan o' War fixed up real nice so you can sail it around to L.A. Second, you're going to buy yourself a big fancy house in L.A. right near the beach. And third… you're going to buy a place for Sixer in that nerd school of his. You did a little research, enough to know that the school is in Pasadena, which is right next door to L.A. Ford can come live with you in your big fancy house, because he'll have to forgive you if you get him into his school after all. Then during the school year Ford can spend all his time studying and nerding it up while you flirt with all the Hollywood babes, and in the summer you can both take the Stan o' War out on the open seas for some adventure and treasure hunting. It's a perfect plan.

Unless, of course, all your moneymaking schemes end in failure and being chased off by pitchfork-wielding mobs. In fairness to yourself, not everything you try goes immediately horribly wrong; sometimes they almost succeed for a little bit. And after a while you get pretty good at getting the hell out of dodge before anyone breaks out the pitchforks, which is nice to avoid. But no matter what you try, nothing seems to make you rich, or even just not poor. You start getting a little desperate, then a lot desperate, then end up in a Colombian jail with a couple of cellmates that apparently don't like you nearly as much as you thought they did. You don't do well in prison. You eventually get out of Columbia with a few less teeth in your mouth and a few more words of Spanish under your belt than you had when you came, and decide to just write the whole country off as a wash. You go on.

You lay on the hood of your car staring up at the night sky, remembering how Ford used to point out the constellations to you while you made up way better stories to go with them than whatever those Ancient Greek guys came up with. You're still too close to downtown Austin to see many stars, and you've forgotten all the constellations Ford ever taught you anyway. There's a speck of light you can just barely see making its way steadily across the sky, and you wonder if it's the world's slowest shooting star. You're too old to believe in magic and have seen too much to believe in happily ever afters, but you could really use a wish right now. Then you realize it's just an airplane.

Ten years. It's been ten years to the day since you got kicked out, and all you have to your name is a car full of junk and some loose change in your pocket worth… $1.13. It almost makes you believe in God again, if only because you've got to think that this is all just one cruel joke at your expense. You slip most of the change back in your pocket and reach into your glove compartment. In your left hand you've got a quarter and in the right a bottle of prescription sleeping pills you managed to get because booze can't make you stop thinking and just pass out like it used to. You stare at them both for a long time, before slowly closing your fist.

"Hello. This is Stanford Pines."

You hang up. It's a waste of a quarter, but then throwing that bottle as far as you could was a waste of pills. Everything you've ever done is just a waste. You're a waste. Things would probably go easier if you would just accept that.

"Please come, Ford." That's all the postcard said, "please come, Ford" and then your address and the return address. It's barely anything, no apology or forgiveness, just a scrap of paper with three words scrawled on it. It isn't nothing, but it's a something that looks a lot like nothing if you squint a little bit, especially since it's been over ten years since the two of you have seen each other. You can't get yourself to Oregon fast enough.

You make a mistake.

No, that's not right. You make a lot of mistakes, so many you can't begin to count them all. You tried once, but lost count at around 36. Maybe if you write them down as you go next time. The end result is because of you Ford is stuck on the other side of a broken crazy sci-fi portal and there's no one but you to fix the thing. You don't know how this thing works or what exactly is broken on it or how you're going to go about fixing it or where Ford is now or what's happening to him there or how long the portal will take to fix or what you're going to do when you run out of food or when people start questioning where Ford's gotten to or… much of anything really. The one thing you do know is that you will be saving Ford. No other outcome is worth considering.

The first night you don't get much sleep, but when you finally do fall into a fitful slumber, you dream. You dream about a triangle who's a real snazzy dresser, and who introduces himself as Bill Cipher. He tells you he's a friend of Ford, that he saw what happened in the basement and he wants to help you fix the portal and save Ford. He even suggests the two of you might be able to make a deal where he can just do the work for you, and he'd be happy to figure out the specifics once you've gotten Ford safely home.

You hate Bill Cipher. Words are inadequate to describe how deeply you loathe him. It's not just because you're pretty sure he had a lot to do with Ford descending into his crazy paranoid state, or because he thinks he can pull one over on you, or even because he thinks he can pull one over on you _that easily_. No, you hate Bill because you look at him and see all the worst parts of yourself. All the selfishness and dishonesty and willingness to do whatever it took just to get one step ahead of everyone else. You take one look at Bill and you know that deep down he's got a voice telling him that the only one worth looking out for is number one and everyone else can go hang, and you hate him for it.

You tell him to get lost, and he does, but then he comes back the next night. And the next night and the next night. Finally after about a dozen refusals on your part he takes the hint and doesn't come back. Good, because you were going to punch him straight in the eye next time you saw him.

Back when you were in school, you had a handful of teachers that got on your case for "underutilizing your potential." Apparently they thought that since Ford was a genius, you had to be pretty smart too. The fact that your grades were barely above average didn't prove them wrong, it just proved that you weren't "applying yourself." Turns out they were wrong, but they were right too. Because now you are applying yourself, and it isn't easy like it would be for Ford, but you are learning. You're not intelligent – no matter how much you know, you'll never feel intelligent – but maybe you aren't stupid either. Maybe you really can pull this off, even if for every two steps you take forward you learn that you were one step farther back to start with than you thought were. You go on.

Your spur of the moment Murder Hut idea turns into the Mystery Shack, and it takes off, more or less. You're good at it; the booming charisma, the snake-oil charm, the swindling of gullible suckers out of their hard-earned cash all comes as naturally to you as breathing. You could do it in your sleep, which is good since you usually stay up half the night working on the portal. Mr. Mystery by day, mad scientist – or your best imitation thereof – by night, day after day, night after night. You go on.

Tourists come and go. Season change one to another to another to another and back again. In the forest, a gnome rebellion rises up, becomes a revolution, becomes a government, goes corrupt, and gets overthrown by the new gnome queen.

And you? You go on.

A kid shows up to the Shack one day to return a screwdriver that you don't remember misplacing, though Moses knows that Durland is incompetent enough to have lost it. You think to yourself _who the heck cares about "child labor laws" anyway_ , and hire the kid on the spot. It's not like Zeus or whatever is going to be around all that long; you go through a lot of handymen.

But Soos turns out to be surprisingly difficult to shake. He's not all that good at his job, but the kid's only like nine years old or something, and you find out he doesn't have a dad around to teach him how to do any of it. He's pretty diligent though, always in either on time or early and usually stays late too, and he's always willing to learn, watching you with wide eyes as you show him the right way to do things and getting a little better himself each time. So maybe you'll let him hang around. He's pretty much the definition of harmless anyway; it'll be fine. And maybe you'll give him some boxing lessons or taking him out fishing. Ten out of ten on the awesomeometer. You know, whatever.

One day a little red-head girl, one of Manly Dan's kids, you think, shows up at the Mystery Shack right as it opens, standing with her hands on her hips and her feet shoulder width apart. "I am not going back to logging camp this summer. I turn 14 later this year, and you don't care about child labor laws anyway, so I'm going to be working part time here for you instead."

Well, she's got you on the child labor laws thing. And you do like her spunk. Not to mention you'd been thinking it might be helpful to get a cashier, someone who can watch the gift shop during peak hours so you can give more tours. So you shrug and say, "Yeah, sure, whatever."

"Yeah, sure, whatever." You say the exact same thing to your nephew when he calls you up with some extremely long sob story about work schedules and summer camps getting shut down and kids that spend way too much time in front of screens, whatever that means, that concludes with him asking you to watch his kids for the summer. "Yeah, sure, whatever." What follows is an outpouring of gratitude, which you're not going to lie feels good, and then a whole lot of details about taking care of the kids and scheduling. Then he promises to call you back later with even more details before hanging up. You hang your phone up too and say, "Whelp, that was a mistake."

You repeat that to yourself a lot over the first half of the summer, when the kids are running around screaming, when they're demanding you feed them multiple times a day, when you don't get down to the basement until after twelve, one, two in the morning or don't ever get down there at all. When Gideon steals Ford's house, your home, and you're left without a roof to put over Dipper and Mabel's heads without relying on charity or even enough money to just order them a pizza. But after you manage to get your hands on all three journals (after you almost had to send them home and lost out on having them around), you never say it again.

Ford's return is a disappointment. You don't mind that much that he punched you since, if you're being honest – you're not that great at being honest as a general rule, but Ford has always been worth at least some effort – then you do kind of deserve it. So a punch for being an idiot, that's fair, but all the rest of it, not so much. All you want is Ford to want you around, that's all you've ever wanted. Yeah, maybe you made a mistake before pushing him into the portal, but you spent thirty years of your life dedicated to bringing him back and you fixed your mistake in the end, so isn't that worth more than some stupid accident that wouldn't have happened at all if Ford hadn't tackled you first, or built the damn portal in the first place? Isn't it worth anything, absolutely anything at all? Well fine. Ford doesn't want you around, then you don't want to want him around anymore either. The minute summer ends you're blowing this pop stand and not looking back.

Then everything goes to hell in a handbasket. You hate Bill Cipher.

It's not too bad at first. Well okay, it's a post-apocalyptic wasteland scenario, but under those circumstances, it's not too bad. The Mystery Shack turns out to be the one place that's protected from all the weird junk that's happening, and pretty soon you manage to get yourself set up as Chief of all the survivors of Bill Cipher's new world order. You can't go more than a minute without worrying about the kids and you expend a lot of mental effort keep yourself from thinking about the fact that they're probably all dead, but you pull through somehow until the day the door flies open and they're all right there on the other side. You wrap your arms around Dipper and Mabel, and Soos and Wendy wrap their arms around you, and you think that now if you could just get Multibear to stop using up all the toilet paper, then things would be just about perfect.

Except the kids almost immediately start going off about wanting to rescue Ford, and pretty soon everyone else is falling in line with that too. Of course they are, everyone likes Ford better than you; they always do. You've been watching after Dipper and Mabel and bonding with them or whatever this whole summer, and Ford's only been here for less than a month and he's spent most of that time down in the basement "trying to avert imminent doom" – which in retrospect was maybe a more valid concern than you realized, but clearly he did a pretty piss-poor job at it – but the kids still like him better.

Fine, obviously you can't stop these idiots from doing whatever they want to do, but you want no part in it. You're done looking out for Ford. Then Dipper, Mabel, Soos, and Wendy all volunteer for the suicide mission inside Bill's floating pyramid and you remember that you're not done looking out for all of them yet.

You make a mistake. You would call it the biggest mistake of your life, but every time you do that, your mistakes just keep getting bigger. Ten seconds, if you could have just held onto your brother's hand for ten seconds, then everything would be okay now. Instead Soos and Wendy have been turned into some kind of wall hanging, and Dipper and Mabel are being chased down by a demon that wants to kill them. You really hate Bill Cipher. You hate yourself.

Ford comes up with a plan: he sacrifices himself, Bill takes over the universe, and you hope that all that distracts Bill long enough to get the kids to some semblance of safety. It is an objectively terrible plan. You find you really don't like the part where Ford sacrifices himself, and maybe you aren't quite as done looking out for him as you thought you were. Of course you aren't; Ford's your brother and he'll always be important to you.

You come up with a counter-proposal: you make the deal with Bill, Bill gets destroyed by the memory gun, you save the kids, you save the world, and everyone goes home happy. It's way better than Ford's plan, so obviously he hates it. "You'll die, Stanley!"

You scoff at the melodrama and start pulling your suit jacket off. "I'm not going to die here. Just make sure you hit me with that ray gun before Bill realizes what's up, and everything will be fine."

"You don't understand. The memory gun is what I'm referring to. This won't be like the time with those government agents. In order to destroy Bill, I'll have to erase everything, your entire memory. Your heart might still be beating afterwards, but everything that makes you, you will be gone."

Ford's words are like a splash of cold water to the face. Your hands still at your bow tie for just a moment, then you force yourself to keep untying it. Careful, practiced movements that you've done a million times before. It's for the kids. It's for Ford. You can do this.

"Well, I guess if this is the end for me, then it's not such a bad way to go. I get to be the hero, and looking back on it, my life wasn't half bad. More like two-thirds. But eh, what the hell, if I could then I'd do it all again. Except maybe Alabama; they really don't like me in Alabama."

"Stanley," Ford says and he looks like he's going to cry or hug you or do something mushy like that. And that's… nice. But you've got a demonic conman to con and family to save, so you don't have time for that. You throw your shirt in his face. "Take you pants off, Sixer."

You're just pulling Ford's gloves on, and Ford's adjusting your bow tie around his neck when you hear Bill coming back down the hall. You wait until the very last second, too late for Ford to be able to respond, and say, "If someone's gotta kill me, I'm glad it's you."

While you were getting changed, Ford told you that when Bill jumped into your head, you'd be sent into the center of your mindscape. You aren't sure what you were expecting that to look like, until you get there and realize that the living room in the Mystery Shack is exactly it. You kick back in your chair and summon up a paddleball and wait for Bill.

He doesn't take nearly as long to arrive as you'd like – you have to make sure he doesn't leave before Ford gets the chance to use the gun on you – but he does seem surprised to find you, which you suppose means you did a good job of keeping your mind blank. Bill's just about to leave when the door slams shut and the room goes up in flames, and you grin. You even manage to get that punch to the eye that you promised yourself in before watching Bill glitch out of existence.

 _Huh_ , you think to yourself, more wry than you should be for such a morbid topic. _That's how I'm gonna die_. You aren't wrong. But then, you aren't entirely right either.

When you die your body flickers out in blue flames, but it doesn't feel like you're burning. It feels like agony all through you, like you're being torn apart at the seams, ripping and pulling and tugging until something in you snaps. Just for a moment, you can see Axolotl towering above you, cradling you in his hands, and, just for a moment, you feel terrified. He smiles down at the both of you and says, "Don't worry; I'm sending you back home."

You go on.

* * *

Next story is "tempus fugit" (Story ID:12725876)


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